Arduino Open-Source Controller Platform Gains Ground

If you're a typical developer, your familiarity with the Arduino open-source hardware platform may be limited. Arduino, based on the Atmel AVR microcontroller, is positioned as an alternative to commercial controller boards. It's not free, but it is highly affordable: A "Getting Started With Arduino" dev kit will set you back only $70.

My sense is that users are boarding the Arduino bandwagon. Chatting with hobbyists at the end of July, I started to realize that Arduino has reached a critical-mass stage similar to where Linux was a decade ago. Its presence in home hobby markets may even influence how major commercial and industrial OEMs choose microcontroller architectures.

Oddly enough, it's not entirely clear that Atmel Corp., the developer of the AVR controller chip at the heart of Arduino, fully realizes how successful Arduino is becoming. Atmel is spending a good deal of time beefing up its higher-end line of ARM products, which makes sense, since the mainstream embedded computing industry lives and breathes by ARM cores. Still, Atmel realizes that 8- and 16-bit entry-level controller chips have always had a long, high-volume history for other semiconductor companies, and AVR will follow that trend -- with a kicker from the open-source home hobbyist community.

When Arduino was launched in 2005, it seemed at first to be an academia-based effort similar to many industry coalition attempts to offer open boards based on PC-AT and similar form factors. Arduino grew out of a program called Wiring, developed by an institute in Bogota, Colombia, and at MIT Media Labs. The Wiring project developed an open programming language and integrated development environment for embedded single-board computers. A team of Italian developers from Ivrea, home of Olivetti, developed an AVR board with open I/O pins in 2005 and offered Arduino to the open-source community.

It's the open I/O specifications that make Arduino different from previous board coalitions. The connectors are exposed and fully documented, so that amateurs can link the Arduino CPU to purpose-built add-on modules called "shields." By placing hardware details and the Arduino language within the Creative Commons licensing program, the Arduino movement encourages sharing and innovation among hardware hobbyists in the same way Linux encouraged growth of open applications.

The program already has grown beyond the boundaries of an AVR CPU, with at least two companies offering ARM CPUs, and another offering modules based on the Microchip PIC family.

The practice among the online hobbyist community is to collaborate whenever possible in the design of unique appliances or robots, which can share modules of common functions, even as the specific devices from individual hobbyists are differentiated from those of collaborators and competitors.

Arduino's success has spurred similar efforts in the traditional-architecture microcontroller community. Freescale Technology, for example, sponsored a "Make It" contest in June at its technology forum, in which hobbyist contestants would build robots and appliances based on Freescale Tower, which borrows board-level concepts from Arduino.

Ultimately, the most important aspect of Arduino's spread may not be the mix of AVR, PIC, ARM, and similar controller chips used in industrial control and robotics. Rather, it will enable more bottom-up industrial design coming from amateurs, some of which may gain the angel financing to become semiprofessional. Efforts like this help a new generation of startups emerge.

It's pretty bad out there. At this year's Black Hat Security Conference, Jerome Radcliffe demonstrated how to hack his own wireless insulin pump.

The development of cyber-security closely follows classic warfare. Pointed sticks were stopped by leather armor. Bow and arrow defeat that armor, so various metal armors were developed. Gunpowder weapons, heavier armor, until you get to present day, with main battle tanks with reactive armor going against self-forging penetrators.

We see the same sort of circular development in cyber security, with ever more sophisticated defenses and attack vectors. That's what the Black Hat conference is all about: trying to come up with better, novel approaches to security.

One answer might be to make the punishment for such a hacking crime be sufficiently steep. I remember a teacher in college talk about minimax optimization. He used the punishment for exceeding the speed limit for his example. If the penalty for exceeding the speed limit were death, then no one would drive faster than the posted limit. The penalty is relatively minor, so everyone speeds.

Stiffer penalties, maybe. But your question was how to prevent it through inital design. I don't think it's possible.

You know, I think about this all the time. I once emailed MIT about their open courseware program whereby all of their grad courses are published online. There *are* people who would like to do away with us. Hmm. Is it really wise to give them the means so easily?

I am grateful for this type of Open Source movement as a way to help me develop assistive techology devices for blind people, but you are right. I like to say that technology empowers us to do whatever we desire. Has anyone noticed that human desires are sometimes a bit dark? No? Looked at the news anytime lately?

How could we make designers aware of this kind of issue?

More practically, how can designers actually incorporate security as you suggest? I'd be an advocate if I knew what that might look like. If you have suggestions, I'd love to hear from you and spread the word that it's advisable!

If it's beginning to take off, I'd like to see someone take security seriously from the beginning of a concept. Open source means the nefarious types will eventually be using the openness to discover attack vectors.

The momentum of some of these grass roots hobbyist movements is amazing. The First Robotics competition has a huge following and the Make It competition created a big buzz at the recent Freescale Technology Forum. If there's a similar carryover for Arduino, it could enjoy some serious growth.

It only makes sense that the timing is right for open-source controller platforms given the rise of open source software in nearly every major application category and the growing popularity of the open Web (i.e., social networks and community-oriented sites). I'm hoping, as Jason notes, that the movement rides out or bypasses any stalemate and keeps the hobbyist innovation engine rolling. That could lead to good things.

It is great to see that open source projects are not limiting themselves to just software.

Once started, most open source projects tend to generate a life of their own. Unfortunately it is also a current trend that once started, the movement hits a stalemate where no further progress is made. It will be interesting to see if this happens to the Arduino movement, or if, as everything is looking at this moment, the movement will just plow through the stalemate and continue giving the community more and more resources and fresh ideas to continue growing.

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